


Money

by wakingsparrow



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: 2.22, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Plothole Fill, Post 2.22, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 01:48:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14683887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wakingsparrow/pseuds/wakingsparrow
Summary: Jughead booked the room at the Five Seasons as soon as FP told him how most of the trailer park had burned down and he had enough strength to lift the phone off the receiver to call.





	Money

Jughead had been saving up money for rent for weeks. Odd jobs, sports or town event related articles for The Greendale Blade he took bike trips to. Shipment unloading down by the river. Moping up at Pop’s. 

Nausea surged through him every time he remembered that Sunnyside, him - his father - his serpent family - was practically indentured to Hiram, and to owe him anything was that much more loathsome. 

.

 

He didn’t need to hear the obnoxious beeping surge of his heart rate to recognize his distress as he blinked back sleep from his long shut eyes, all to try to comprehended what his father was saying. It was all gone, the serpents, their home, South Side…but Fangs was alive. He wanted to shutter a sob, but he was so thirsty from having oxygen tubes shoved into him, nothing came. They had still fought and lost. It had been for nothing.

 

And everything. Everything they owned was going to go to collections for his bills from his week’s coma at the hospital. He knew that. He knew how costs like that worked after JB got sick years before. The fighting in the kitchen, the icy shatter of a bottle off a wall. Gladys soothing a now woken Jellybean in the bedroom while FP had slurred ‘What the hell you lookin at boy?” at a wide-eyed Jughead in the livingroom corner. He knew poor. He knew it all the way through. 

They were worse than broke now. It was all gone.

Jughead booked the room at the Five Seasons as soon as FP told him how most of the trailer park had burned down and he had enough strength to lift the phone off the receiver to call. 

It would be money he saved for rent to pay to that bastard Hiram Lodge. The money he’d hid in Pickens Park under three loose bricks by the long disused lead piped water fountain. He wouldn’t spend a penny, ironically, on something Hiram Lodge had done or ruined. The money he’d saved would be for Betty. For Betty, torn and battling demons and yet still so dedicated she had spend most of her time at his bed while he dreamt of what things would be like without him.

That money would be between the two of them. 

.

 

Jughead stared up past the warmth, past locks of gold and hot breath itching his neck and cheek, past their chests heaving together, past his own gravestone and the way her fingers had ghosted across his name, begging him to come back.

Maybe he had died after all. Maybe this was heaven.

**Author's Note:**

> Thugheadjones on tumblr


End file.
